I agree with everything you’ve said. If anything, I think the effect is underrated because it’s socially taboo to admit we’ve been majorly influenced by fiction. We all want to convey that we are Very Serious People who make decisions by reading serious scientific papers, not that we got into environmentalism because we watched Fern Gully as a kid, or whatever.
Part of the challenge with using fiction to persuade people is that fiction is often most effective for conveying views when it’s not being explicitly didactic, e.g., compare Soviet and Chinese propaganda films, which are universally terrible, or at best cheesy, with how America in the 20th century gained a huge amount of soft power through media that implicitly conveyed its worldview. Many people have that complaint about HPMOR.
To some extent this just comes down to the quality of the underlying work, people only call something didactic when it’s too obvious. But it adds additional constraints to the problem, writing a fun adventure is hard, writing a fun adventure that also teaches people about endocrinology is much harder.
I also think fiction is generally harder than nonfiction. Most educated people can write a comprehensible essay fairly easily (arguably they do so several times a day with emails, tweets, etc.), but would struggle to write a good short story, especially if it was also trying to convey the same information. The floor on bad factual writing is that it’s basically readable, the floor on bad fiction writing is that it’s excruciating.
I agree with everything you’ve said. If anything, I think the effect is underrated because it’s socially taboo to admit we’ve been majorly influenced by fiction. We all want to convey that we are Very Serious People who make decisions by reading serious scientific papers, not that we got into environmentalism because we watched Fern Gully as a kid, or whatever.
Part of the challenge with using fiction to persuade people is that fiction is often most effective for conveying views when it’s not being explicitly didactic, e.g., compare Soviet and Chinese propaganda films, which are universally terrible, or at best cheesy, with how America in the 20th century gained a huge amount of soft power through media that implicitly conveyed its worldview. Many people have that complaint about HPMOR.
To some extent this just comes down to the quality of the underlying work, people only call something didactic when it’s too obvious. But it adds additional constraints to the problem, writing a fun adventure is hard, writing a fun adventure that also teaches people about endocrinology is much harder.
I also think fiction is generally harder than nonfiction. Most educated people can write a comprehensible essay fairly easily (arguably they do so several times a day with emails, tweets, etc.), but would struggle to write a good short story, especially if it was also trying to convey the same information. The floor on bad factual writing is that it’s basically readable, the floor on bad fiction writing is that it’s excruciating.